Finally I decided to publish this post, not to purposely dig out negative things about the event and our city but I hope that it can create public awareness about the behaviour of the public which has turned into a negative culture that may need to be changed.
First, the rubbish bin has not extinct yet, there are rubbish bins on the street. We have no excuse that we can’t find one because we can always our take our own rubbish home and throw it into our own rubbish bin. We are living in the 21st century, anybody live in a city or modernized world but don’t have even a small bag to store rubbish at home? And think carefully what would you feel if each members of the family throw rubbish everywhere in a house?
Then there is no reason to throw rubbish on the street because this is a selfish and an irresponsible action. The rubbish thrower only remember about his/her own convinience and ignore the public clealiness and hygiene as his/her responsibility. If one person does it, it doesn’t seem to affect the beauty of the city, what if hundreds of people doing it at the same time, it can make a city looks ugly. An ugly city reflects that the culture of its residents are ugly.
! ! ! These scenes shown in these pictures captured by my camera after the event ended should not have happened actually. ! ! !
But it happened.
Second, everyone of us have the responsibility to stop this practice. Sometimes the human actions have similarity with the chain mail. People around may be easily infected with the bad behaviour and keep on forwarding it to the people nearby. If someone see that the person beside him/her throwing the rubbish on the ground, he/she will start having an excuse that someone else is also doing the same thing to reduce his feeling of guiltiness and easily forget the fact that the action might be wrong.
Another example, if you found parking spaces while you are searcing for one and you are very happy, but both cars on the left and right of your parking slots were parked out of the lines, what will you do?
1. <most people will do this> You may follow the trend to park out of the line as well. But you never know that after the car beside you left, you are the one to inherit this illegal action to the coming cars which can be fined.
2. If the space is big enough, you park your car according to the line on the parking lot. You may temporarily cause the car behind you to horn at you because it seems that you have taken 2 lots of parking space, but you are right because after your neighbours left, the next cars that take up the spaces will very likely to follow the rules back.
Think carefully. Of cause there is nothing absolutely right or wrong, but we have to minimize our own selfishness to maximize the public benefits.
These pictures show that there are a lot of individual selfishness which most of them forgot that they had given a bad impression to tourists about their own city and their own ugly face which always attached to what they have been doing. And they taught the bad habit to the people around them.
Finally, there is no excuse. Some people may give unreasonable excuses such as it is the cleaners’ job to clean it up, or what is the purpose we hire the cleaner. Some people may say that they follow the others to throw their unwanted rubbish in a centralised area which make the life of the street sweepers easier. It sounds a bit logical in a minor scope but it is actually unreasonable. Why?
1. If the rubbish is left in an open area which it is visible to everyone, it creates a bad impression especially to tourists and it tells people around you to do the same thing as well.
2. The authority can save on hiring the cleaners if there is a public awareness of keeping the area not only clean but tidy. Then, the government can use of the money from tax payers in more beneficial ways.
*** Talking about the government, actually they have the responsibility to stop this negative culture as well. From what I have found on google, some country apply the law of “pay as you throw” which can be very effective because instead of hiring cleaners, the authority can hire the “cleanliness police”. Although they need more man power, but they can generate income from the fine that they might have collected. They can hire part-timer and in this way, job opportunities are created. It may take months or years to reduce the rubbish-throwing habit of the public, by then they can reduce the man power to save the cost of hiring the the cleaners as well as the “cleanliness police”. However, corruption is the obstacle in making idea success.
Well, finally I announce that this is the last post of the Malaysia Day Celebration 2009. You can get the list of posts from part 1 to part 10 here.
1Malaysia
